The whole reaction to TMA (transmisogyny affected) and TME (transmisogyny exempt) is so disingenuous and dumb. There are people who pretend to not understand it or actively change the definition to suit their rhetoric about the evil baeddel terf trans women. There's also the handful of people who genuinely don't know what it means, who've been scared and misinformed by the previous of people, so they don't even look into it any further. It's literally the easiest to debunk bit of misinformation too, if you even think about it for a few moments.
So essentially the people who take objection with TMA/TME language make the criticism that it is essentially introducing a new gender/sex binary and is forcing people to reveal what genitals they have.
The first point can be easily refuted by the fact that TMA literally only includes people affected by transmisogyny, meaning trans women and nonbinary people that consider themselves transfeminine or are otherwise affected by transmisogyny. TME is literally everyone else. You can be a cis man, cis woman, transmasc or any nonbinary person who isn't transfem (including non-transfem amab nonbinary people) and be TME.
Criticism of TMA/TME language almost always comes from TME people (for reasons we cannot fully understand) which makes the second point of the criticism, that TMA/TME forces people to reveal what genitals they have, particularly disingenuous. If this was true, then the criticism should definitely be coming more from TMA people since TME, as explained above, tells you almost nothing about a person, their gender or their genitals, but knowing someone is TMA can allow you to make a pretty good educated guess.
So then the language used is fairly easy to understand and pretty well focused on the issue that it's meant to talk about. The aversion to it is fairly clearly not due to misunderstanding in most cases, but due to deliberate hostility against attempts to talk about and acknowledge transmisogyny directly.
Funnily enough, as a trans woman and transfeminist I've actually mostly dropped "TME/TMA" from my vocabulary, for reasons I won't overtake this post with. Whatever critiques I have are quite separate from the common critiques of the terminology, which are very clearly based in denying that trans women face a unique form of oppression that even other trans people perpetuate.
What I well say is that the equivocation of "TME/TMA" to "genital reveals" is a gross obscuring of two things:
If you know a woman is trans, you don't know what genitals are. SRS has existed as a medical procedure for much of modern trans history and to be quite blunt about it, castration as a form of gender-affirmation for our historical precursors has existed for far longer. This objection to the language is effectively revealing not merely how people are eager to hypersexualize trans women and cast us perverts while they comment on our genitalia, but also clearly reveals how the average person simply conceptualizes trans women as "d*ckgirls" or "sh*males". To the average person, we are effectively walking porn tropes-chew on how THAT is also a result of transmisogynistic fetishization.
It is obscuring that coercive societal sexing is relevant to trans oppression, something which we do not elide when we highlight how it's not merely cis women who face reproductive exploitation, but are more than happy to gloss over entirely when it comes to the intensification of sexualization, misogyny and violence that trans women are confronted with. Transmisogyny is rooted in the disruption of gendered fixity AND the rejection of compulsory manhood for those coercively sexed male. We face particular contours of community and social punishment for being both "failed men" who could not live up to the patriarchal masculine imperatives, as well as "failed women" who cannot fulfill the reproductive role that is the sole source of 'respectability' under a misogynistic regime.
We are left with the rather grim conclusion that more than anything else, people do not want us to be able to name our oppression, to describe it and highlight its contours and features, and any attempts to do so will themselves invite harsh punishment, hyperscrutiny and fetishizing sexualization-even as people deny that there exists a form of oppression that targets us directly in this very manner.
What a wonderful social climate to exist in.
Note: "compulsory manhood" should be attributed to @maidensblade on Twitter, with much thanks. "Heterosexuality is a regime" was popularised as a memetic condensing of many truths about social-constructionist feminism by @bloomfilters, also on Twitter.
